April 1, 2026
384: The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy
A 1999 film theorizes a sinister connection to the real world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Controversy Unmasked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Lee and this is Ghost Town.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Released in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut is an erotic, psychological drama directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, while the two were married, probably at the height of their fame as a Hollywood-Alist couple.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The film had its place in history and Kubrick's filmography of course, but as the 21st century began, it took on a whole new meaning, a darker one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Did Stanley Kubrick know about the threat of secret cults, rich and powerful masterminds and sex trafficking far before our culture caught up to their grimmerialities?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We'll find out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: have you seen eyes wide shot?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I saw it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think I saw it on the theater when it came out and I I may have seen it once since like when it first came out on you know on video But it's been a while.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've actually been it's been one of those things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was like I wanted to try to wrap my head around it Yeah, going back and watching old movies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, how well have you seen it really really?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I watched it for this yeah and I was curious about it too but I watched it and I had a similar experience where I didn't I wasn't a huge fan of it then and I was a huge Kubrick fan in general but but it definitely now that I'm older and in a relationship it's it's it's a really about like a the dark inner workings of the mind and being in a monogamous
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[SPEAKER_01]: as it just visually has the like yeah and it's very slow it's a very slow paste movie you think about like you know a dark cabal you don't think about like really long shots like sweeping pans and tilts with cameras
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, the plot of, as much as just to refresh your memory, centers on a Manhattan doctor who is shocked when his wife reveals that she's contemplated cheating on him, processing that information the doctor embarks on a night-long adventure, eventually infiltrating a secret society's masked Orgy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They are one of the Orgy members seemingly saves the doctor and winds up dead.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As he looks into things more deeply, what the confused and odd protagonist finds is a criminal cabal, but also knowledge about his own sexual identity and relationship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The movie is based on a 1926 novella called Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, but Kubrick transfers the story setting from early 20th century Vienna to 1990's New York City.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick obtained the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s when he was looking for his next big project after 2001 a space autosie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick considered Dream Story a perfect text for a film adaptation about the complexity of sexual relationships, but it was a long time in the making and fell by the way side for a while.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick revived the project in the 1990s and attached cruise and kidman.
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[SPEAKER_01]: who were eager to work with the iconic director.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As I tried to begin shooting in England, where Kubrick lived at the time, I November 4th, 1996.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Originally, it was slated to shoot for about three months, but went on for a little bit longer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Do you know how long this film was going to be?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it came out in 99, is it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're wrong with that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I didn't know they were filming at that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, a long, long time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The film was shot for 400 days and it's a Guinness World record for the longest shoot subsequent shoot days in a row.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When you watched it, did it feel like it should have 400 days or you figured it was just kind of like probably, um, bloat, like, I don't know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No, they do a pretty good job of making it seem like, you know, it's a day versus a year more than a year really But I think it's really interesting where it's like, okay Tom Cruise and Cole Kidman They think they're going on a shoot for three months.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're highly sought after actors, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: They have projects lined up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're there for a fucking year They're just hanging out there with Stanley Kubrick doing like five million takes for him That was interesting.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were there for so long because he is a perfectionist
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[SPEAKER_01]: Numerous scenes, irrespective of their length, were filmed upwards of 70 times.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One scene of Tom Cruise walking through a door was filmed 95 times.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, Tom Cruise developed an ulcer because of the stressful shoots.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, finally, filming was completed in June of 1998.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So after a year of development, 400 days of shooting, Kubrick spent another 400 days or so editing the film.
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[SPEAKER_01]: After that, Kubrick submitted the final cut of the film to Warner Brothers on March 1st, 1999, and it was viewed by Cruise, Kidman, and Studio Executives
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[SPEAKER_01]: On March 7th, mere days after the first screening of this film, Kubrick died, the director suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep just as the film was finished, finished in quotes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I say that because some post-production was done the week after his death, which led to some public debate over the film's state of completion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Still, films were meant to be seen, especially this long anticipated one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Warner Bros. began an extensive marketing campaign to promote the film in early 1999, though the publicity materials were vague.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Marketing as an erotic thriller.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I remember this specifically for myself, where I'm like, oh, this is gonna be like a sexy film, the poster, which again, I've seen since then, is Nicole Kidman kind of peering.
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[SPEAKER_01]: At the viewer, Tom Cruise, you know, she's like very close to Tom Cruise, they're kind of kissing her about to kiss.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It seems sexy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Says Willa Paskin, the host of Dakota Ring, who does an incredible deep dive into the Eyes Wide Check conspiracy, which you should check out if you want more information on this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Quote, quote, "'Pote almost everybody agrees that he probably would have fust over the movie until it was actually released.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He had a reputation for fussing with movies until the very last possible minute."
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this wasn't quite the last possible minute.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No one could know exactly what he would have done.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in his absence, his collaborators tried to stick as closely as possible to the version that he had turned in.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But they had to make at least one big change.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You see Kubrick promised the studio he'd deliver an R-rated movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the movie, which, again, I remember experiencing this as a younger person, was NC17, which is a box office killer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they took out some thrusting, some women's genitalia, and they got their R-rated.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Still, rumors of the initial rating prevailed, and the headlines about a scene too graphic to be shown uncensored, plus the years of curiosity surrounding Tom and Nicole's marriage, all set people up myself included to expect a certain kind of sexy movie, which it kind of was, but mostly wasn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Eyes wide shut had its world premiere in Los Angeles on July 13, 1999.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It received generally positive reviews from the critics, what the audience expected was sex.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What it got was a kind of abstract secret society and highly cerebral meditation on marriage and fidelity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sexy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The movie came and the movie went.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The millennium turned and we moved forward.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the like 2000s and the 2010s, another story about a secret group of rich and powerful men who prey on young women came to widespread public attention.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Only it wasn't a movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was real.
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[SPEAKER_01]: More After This Break
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[SPEAKER_01]: The idea of a cloaked ritualistic secret cabal that wreaks sexual havoc is one that's been prevalent throughout history.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So much so that it has a name, the nocturnal ritual fantasy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The tropes always been around, with witches, heretics, you know, Christians, antichristians, and the like.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the mid-2010s, the nocturnal ritual fantasy was back in a big way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I'm talking about, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, tell me about Bohemian growth?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We could talk about that, we could talk about Epstein, we could talk about any of the things that kind of have been cultivated through this rumors and fact.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Also, QAnon also pizza gates people began thinking of the movie is why I tried because of all these things that kind of
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[SPEAKER_01]: became a part of the landscape a little bit more than they had been before.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It also came out of course that Jeffrey Epstein abused dozens of minors at his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida, and the abuse included a large network of rich and powerful people in tech, real estate, finance, entertainment, politics, and of course British royalty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There was so much speculation going on, but everyone kind of agreed, at the time a full blown conspiracy was being revealed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When Epstein died by suicide, a widely questioned suicide, in 2019, a certain Stanley Kubrick film became even more a part of the conversation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People believe that maybe just maybe Kubrick's film predicted Epstein and all the damage that he had done.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Said Willa Paskin of Dakota Ring quote, The idea here was not that Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut happened to be thematically relevant again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was that Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut was concretely relevant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Far from being a piece of fiction, emerging theory around the film is this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that Kubrick supposedly had come across some information that they were rich people that were trafficking children and he decided to make a movie about it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When he did and showed it to the studio Warner Brothers, a rich and powerful company, they called the secret ring to have him killed to prevent this information from reaching the masses.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the sex cult that he was referencing, this big group of powerful people, somehow had the movie edited before it was released in theaters, and then this rich and powerful sex cult he was referencing, somehow had the movie edited before it was released in theaters, had the movie edited to get rid of all of the most incriminating details.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So where are you out with this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What's going on in your head?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's such like the movie itself is like sort of one of a kind, so I get that aspect of it and it's very easy to kind of, I mean, just so many things happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Stanley Kubrick is kind of known.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, as, you know, he had, he even has last movie that he, you know, he died was AI, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was his move.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So there's always been a lot around Stanley Kubrick.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well around like sci-fi, the digital age, digital conspiracy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is prophetic in that sense.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And also, I mean, when we talk about other movies that he's made that have conspiracies woven around them, we can talk about, you know, the theory that he shot the moon landing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was a popular one that I perpetuated growing up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Also, subliminal messages and codes around subliminal messages and codes in the shining.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's a whole documentary about the shining and the messages that he was allegedly trying to communicate in that movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But eyes wide shut really connected with people in this specific time and place.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let me share some evidence that people who believe this theory point two in the movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: First.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The film has a lot of Illuminati symbolism, and it's about a secret society, so mapping, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Pretty generally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People think that it's using a blueprint of the Illuminati, or some such society, and kind of riffing off of it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Second, the women in the ritual origin scene all appear to be adults, but close watchers point to a few other scenes that demonstrate that Kubrick was trying to expose sex trafficking.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you remember the scene, but there's one with actor Lili Slebioski and she's kind of being sold to Tom Cruise's character by her father at a store at a costume store, disturbing, but Puno's.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then there's the final scene in the film, arguably the, to theorists, the most powerful evidence that this theory is real.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I, I don't have to show you this one
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[SPEAKER_01]: about theory, I mean, I don't think so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I just, I can't, not to spoiler alert.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't believe this theory, but it's so subtle.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And what we'll talk about why conspiracy theorists weave the subtlety into their theory as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But it's so subtle and it's so generalized.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we've talked about, you know, a couple minutes ago, how this theme perpetuates itself throughout history, too.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, we want to believe in it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: like a ritualistic secret society we love that stuff the general idea that there's like rich and powerful people in there that get away with stuff yeah is in a very general sense sure yeah and it's true like rich and powerful people do get away with stuff definitely
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[SPEAKER_00]: you know is he was you know Stanley Cooper kind of like yeah I'm a filmmaker but more importantly I want to expose things first I I don't know I feel like probably it's being a filmmaker was probably and making a good film was probably the most important thing and compromising that just to kind of have this kind of you know is a campaign to like expose something
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[SPEAKER_00]: that might get in the way of that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't see that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No, if you want to expose something called the police, you know, do something where it's like, hey, this is bad.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're all about non-subtle messaging these days, but the fact that he spent millions and millions of dollars and more than a year and a half to make a very subtle film.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, do you think he had Tom Cruise walk through a door 95 times because he's like,
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[SPEAKER_01]: the cabal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't really track for me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, all the theorists have answers to this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So let's go back to that scene that end scene which I watched again recently before you even got here to record.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's Harvard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're Christmas shopping with their daughter at kind of an FAO Schwartz thing and they're they're kind of wind It's actually a beautiful shot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's really long shot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're winding through the Hallways of this giant toy store and the daughter's looking at different things and they're kind of interacting with her and they're interacting with each other But there's this very and again when I say subtle.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean so so subtle moment
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[SPEAKER_01]: Where you see the kid rounding a corner into an aisle and you see her being followed by two male extras.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The two men theorist claim can be seen earlier in the film and they returned here at the end to take the girl away.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is so quick.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I promise you you will not even notice it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Very subtly, Kidman's character pushes her child towards the two older men, and again, this is minuscule, and she walks off essentially with them, forcing her into this life of brainwashing and Dr. Nation torture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In exchange, she will become a member of this elite world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This moment is, you blink and you miss it, and it's what people hold up as definitive proof
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[SPEAKER_01]: You'll have to let me know what you think of it when you watch the film.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, the film that was released is just a version of this original movie, right, according to theorists.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the original Kubrick had harder evidence, according to them, that there was things happening with the sex trafficking ring.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when people say that it's subtle, these theorists are like actually there was a different film that had much more concrete evidence in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that didn't see the light of day because the movie itself was tampered with after Kubrick's death.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go back to Stanley Kubrick's death.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The timing to me does see read strange.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like mere days after you're done with this film kind of done, you die heartbreaking, like really tragic actually.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But in this theory, Kubrick was killed because he made eyes wide shut and it was going to blow the whole whistle on the cabal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The 23-something minutes cut from the version Warner Bros. saw because of the rating was due to theorists, to the studio protecting the Kabul, cutting the film to remove evidence, and alerting them to what Stanley Cooper could done, thus ending his life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But in re-editing the movie the Kabul failed to remove a handful of extremely subtle clues from the film, the ones that we just went through.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The theory got even more popular in 2024 when Roger Avery, the director of rules of attraction and the co-writer of pulp fiction, goes on the Joe Rogan experience.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, here we are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Avery and Rogan start talking about Stanley Kubrick and Roger Avery tells Rogan a story about eyes wide shut.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Avery says that while they were first screening the movie in England, there were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside, and inside Kubrick was yelling at executives and saying, it's my movie, you can't cut it, you can't cut my film, blah, blah, blah arguing, then Kubrick dies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Roger Avery admits that he had heard the story second hand from a William Morris agent who has since conveniently died.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But of course, it seemed credible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And Avery is a Hollywood insider.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's a writer and director talking to Joe Rogan, one of the most influential podcasters.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the question remains, why make a movie about elite sex trafficking and why not just like call the police?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It took Kubrick decades to make the film, which feels like a very slow and ultimately kind of subtle way to break up or alert people to this powerful cabal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As for cutting lots of damning sex cult evidence from the film, well, the reality was far different.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Exxx were reluctant to cut anything out of Kubrick's film because it was the author's last masterpiece as a person who was living.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What's the AI one that he made after that called?
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[SPEAKER_00]: called Artificial Intelligence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So those are reasons that this theory is dispelled.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick's even his co-writer, Frederick Grafail, told Dakota Ring that Kubrick was quote, 70 years old and looked about 120.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was very stressed and producing that movie was enough to kill him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Stanley Kubrick's final film was fiction, but in the mid-2000s it felt like so much more.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Epstein's world seemed elusive, powerful and terrifying, and the systemic trauma around what he had done was, it is almost too much to bear.
17:35.582 --> 17:43.030
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps this conspiracy is so compelling because we wanted someone to have known, and wanted someone to have tried to do something, we wanted it to be real.
17:43.511 --> 17:45.353
[SPEAKER_01]: We wanted this conspiracy to be real.
17:45.333 --> 17:49.860
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll leave you with another quote by Willa Pascin, which sums it up really well, okay?
17:49.880 --> 17:57.513
[SPEAKER_01]: Quote, believing even something is disturbing as the conspiracy about eyes wide shut is more comforting than reality, which is that so many people knew and said nothing.
17:57.833 --> 18:03.543
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the conspiracy, in its alternate reality, at least someone, a powerful man no less, tried to warn us.
18:04.184 --> 18:08.050
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all a fiction, but you can understand why it might be preferable to the facts.
00:00.031 --> 00:02.202
[SPEAKER_00]: Controversy Unmasked.
00:02.222 --> 00:02.986
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton.
00:03.207 --> 00:05.518
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Lee and this is Ghost Town.
00:21.648 --> 00:36.670
[SPEAKER_01]: Released in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut is an erotic, psychological drama directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, while the two were married, probably at the height of their fame as a Hollywood-Alist couple.
00:36.650 --> 00:45.147
[SPEAKER_01]: The film had its place in history and Kubrick's filmography of course, but as the 21st century began, it took on a whole new meaning, a darker one.
00:45.708 --> 00:53.704
[SPEAKER_01]: Did Stanley Kubrick know about the threat of secret cults, rich and powerful masterminds and sex trafficking far before our culture caught up to their grimmerialities?
00:54.305 --> 00:58.894
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll find out.
00:58.874 --> 01:01.218
[SPEAKER_01]: have you seen eyes wide shot?
01:01.238 --> 01:01.999
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I saw it.
01:02.159 --> 01:12.355
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I saw it on the theater when it came out and I I may have seen it once since like when it first came out on you know on video But it's been a while.
01:12.375 --> 01:14.258
[SPEAKER_00]: I've actually been it's been one of those things.
01:14.278 --> 01:18.344
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like I wanted to try to wrap my head around it Yeah, going back and watching old movies.
01:18.605 --> 01:20.848
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, how well have you seen it really really?
01:20.828 --> 01:48.152
[SPEAKER_01]: I watched it for this yeah and I was curious about it too but I watched it and I had a similar experience where I didn't I wasn't a huge fan of it then and I was a huge Kubrick fan in general but but it definitely now that I'm older and in a relationship it's it's it's a really about like a the dark inner workings of the mind and being in a monogamous
01:48.132 --> 02:03.458
[SPEAKER_01]: as it just visually has the like yeah and it's very slow it's a very slow paste movie you think about like you know a dark cabal you don't think about like really long shots like sweeping pans and tilts with cameras
02:03.438 --> 02:18.390
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the plot of, as much as just to refresh your memory, centers on a Manhattan doctor who is shocked when his wife reveals that she's contemplated cheating on him, processing that information the doctor embarks on a night-long adventure, eventually infiltrating a secret society's masked Orgy.
02:19.071 --> 02:23.320
[SPEAKER_01]: They are one of the Orgy members seemingly saves the doctor and winds up dead.
02:23.300 --> 02:32.776
[SPEAKER_01]: As he looks into things more deeply, what the confused and odd protagonist finds is a criminal cabal, but also knowledge about his own sexual identity and relationship.
02:33.478 --> 02:44.076
[SPEAKER_01]: The movie is based on a 1926 novella called Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, but Kubrick transfers the story setting from early 20th century Vienna to 1990's New York City.
02:44.056 --> 02:51.010
[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick obtained the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s when he was looking for his next big project after 2001 a space autosie.
02:51.611 --> 03:00.488
[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick considered Dream Story a perfect text for a film adaptation about the complexity of sexual relationships, but it was a long time in the making and fell by the way side for a while.
03:00.909 --> 03:04.596
[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick revived the project in the 1990s and attached cruise and kidman.
03:04.863 --> 03:06.886
[SPEAKER_01]: who were eager to work with the iconic director.
03:07.626 --> 03:11.752
[SPEAKER_01]: As I tried to begin shooting in England, where Kubrick lived at the time, I November 4th, 1996.
03:13.033 --> 03:16.798
[SPEAKER_01]: Originally, it was slated to shoot for about three months, but went on for a little bit longer.
03:16.838 --> 03:18.560
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you know how long this film was going to be?
03:18.580 --> 03:20.482
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it came out in 99, is it?
03:20.763 --> 03:21.363
[SPEAKER_00]: We're wrong with that.
03:21.564 --> 03:21.984
[SPEAKER_00]: You're right.
03:22.084 --> 03:22.905
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're right.
03:23.005 --> 03:25.909
[SPEAKER_00]: So I didn't know they were filming at that.
03:26.733 --> 03:29.418
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, a long, long time.
03:29.739 --> 03:37.474
[SPEAKER_01]: The film was shot for 400 days and it's a Guinness World record for the longest shoot subsequent shoot days in a row.
03:37.735 --> 03:44.809
[SPEAKER_00]: When you watched it, did it feel like it should have 400 days or you figured it was just kind of like probably, um, bloat, like, I don't know.
03:44.789 --> 03:57.761
[SPEAKER_01]: No, they do a pretty good job of making it seem like, you know, it's a day versus a year more than a year really But I think it's really interesting where it's like, okay Tom Cruise and Cole Kidman They think they're going on a shoot for three months.
03:57.781 --> 03:59.463
[SPEAKER_01]: They're highly sought after actors, right?
03:59.483 --> 04:00.644
[SPEAKER_01]: They have projects lined up.
04:00.884 --> 04:08.171
[SPEAKER_01]: They're there for a fucking year They're just hanging out there with Stanley Kubrick doing like five million takes for him That was interesting.
04:08.791 --> 04:11.674
[SPEAKER_01]: They were there for so long because he is a perfectionist
04:11.654 --> 04:15.927
[SPEAKER_01]: Numerous scenes, irrespective of their length, were filmed upwards of 70 times.
04:16.177 --> 04:20.163
[SPEAKER_01]: One scene of Tom Cruise walking through a door was filmed 95 times.
04:20.784 --> 04:23.548
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, Tom Cruise developed an ulcer because of the stressful shoots.
04:24.249 --> 04:27.494
[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, finally, filming was completed in June of 1998.
04:28.736 --> 04:34.885
[SPEAKER_01]: So after a year of development, 400 days of shooting, Kubrick spent another 400 days or so editing the film.
04:35.506 --> 04:45.340
[SPEAKER_01]: After that, Kubrick submitted the final cut of the film to Warner Brothers on March 1st, 1999, and it was viewed by Cruise, Kidman, and Studio Executives
04:45.320 --> 04:56.705
[SPEAKER_01]: On March 7th, mere days after the first screening of this film, Kubrick died, the director suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep just as the film was finished, finished in quotes.
04:57.768 --> 05:04.543
[SPEAKER_01]: I say that because some post-production was done the week after his death, which led to some public debate over the film's state of completion.
05:05.587 --> 05:10.053
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, films were meant to be seen, especially this long anticipated one.
05:10.553 --> 05:16.681
[SPEAKER_01]: Warner Bros. began an extensive marketing campaign to promote the film in early 1999, though the publicity materials were vague.
05:17.061 --> 05:18.643
[SPEAKER_01]: Marketing as an erotic thriller.
05:18.703 --> 05:26.673
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember this specifically for myself, where I'm like, oh, this is gonna be like a sexy film, the poster, which again, I've seen since then, is Nicole Kidman kind of peering.
05:26.713 --> 05:32.120
[SPEAKER_01]: At the viewer, Tom Cruise, you know, she's like very close to Tom Cruise, they're kind of kissing her about to kiss.
05:32.761 --> 05:34.783
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems sexy.
05:34.763 --> 05:42.052
[SPEAKER_01]: Says Willa Paskin, the host of Dakota Ring, who does an incredible deep dive into the Eyes Wide Check conspiracy, which you should check out if you want more information on this.
05:42.212 --> 05:47.858
[SPEAKER_01]: Quote, quote, "'Pote almost everybody agrees that he probably would have fust over the movie until it was actually released.
05:48.399 --> 05:52.744
[SPEAKER_01]: He had a reputation for fussing with movies until the very last possible minute."
05:52.764 --> 05:54.686
[SPEAKER_01]: And this wasn't quite the last possible minute.
05:55.207 --> 05:56.989
[SPEAKER_01]: No one could know exactly what he would have done.
05:57.530 --> 06:02.796
[SPEAKER_01]: So in his absence, his collaborators tried to stick as closely as possible to the version that he had turned in.
06:04.480 --> 06:06.342
[SPEAKER_01]: But they had to make at least one big change.
06:06.583 --> 06:09.507
[SPEAKER_01]: You see Kubrick promised the studio he'd deliver an R-rated movie.
06:09.527 --> 06:17.697
[SPEAKER_01]: And the movie, which, again, I remember experiencing this as a younger person, was NC17, which is a box office killer.
06:18.418 --> 06:23.805
[SPEAKER_01]: So they took out some thrusting, some women's genitalia, and they got their R-rated.
06:23.785 --> 06:39.499
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, rumors of the initial rating prevailed, and the headlines about a scene too graphic to be shown uncensored, plus the years of curiosity surrounding Tom and Nicole's marriage, all set people up myself included to expect a certain kind of sexy movie, which it kind of was, but mostly wasn't.
06:39.479 --> 06:43.947
[SPEAKER_01]: Eyes wide shut had its world premiere in Los Angeles on July 13, 1999.
06:44.468 --> 06:49.276
[SPEAKER_01]: It received generally positive reviews from the critics, what the audience expected was sex.
06:49.837 --> 06:55.587
[SPEAKER_01]: What it got was a kind of abstract secret society and highly cerebral meditation on marriage and fidelity.
06:55.627 --> 06:57.370
[SPEAKER_01]: Sexy.
06:57.350 --> 06:58.953
[SPEAKER_01]: The movie came and the movie went.
06:59.334 --> 07:01.117
[SPEAKER_01]: The millennium turned and we moved forward.
07:01.719 --> 07:09.875
[SPEAKER_01]: In the like 2000s and the 2010s, another story about a secret group of rich and powerful men who prey on young women came to widespread public attention.
07:10.556 --> 07:11.558
[SPEAKER_01]: Only it wasn't a movie.
07:12.059 --> 07:12.560
[SPEAKER_01]: It was real.
07:13.322 --> 07:14.464
[SPEAKER_01]: More After This Break
07:14.917 --> 07:20.925
[SPEAKER_01]: The idea of a cloaked ritualistic secret cabal that wreaks sexual havoc is one that's been prevalent throughout history.
07:21.466 --> 07:24.710
[SPEAKER_01]: So much so that it has a name, the nocturnal ritual fantasy.
07:25.231 --> 07:30.498
[SPEAKER_01]: The tropes always been around, with witches, heretics, you know, Christians, antichristians, and the like.
07:30.859 --> 07:34.684
[SPEAKER_01]: In the mid-2010s, the nocturnal ritual fantasy was back in a big way.
07:35.265 --> 07:36.306
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I'm talking about, right?
07:37.228 --> 07:38.950
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, tell me about Bohemian growth?
07:39.200 --> 07:46.978
[SPEAKER_01]: We could talk about that, we could talk about Epstein, we could talk about any of the things that kind of have been cultivated through this rumors and fact.
07:47.359 --> 07:54.475
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, QAnon also pizza gates people began thinking of the movie is why I tried because of all these things that kind of
07:54.455 --> 07:57.299
[SPEAKER_01]: became a part of the landscape a little bit more than they had been before.
07:58.441 --> 08:12.480
[SPEAKER_01]: It also came out of course that Jeffrey Epstein abused dozens of minors at his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida, and the abuse included a large network of rich and powerful people in tech, real estate, finance, entertainment, politics, and of course British royalty.
08:12.460 --> 08:19.553
[SPEAKER_01]: There was so much speculation going on, but everyone kind of agreed, at the time a full blown conspiracy was being revealed.
08:20.475 --> 08:28.410
[SPEAKER_01]: When Epstein died by suicide, a widely questioned suicide, in 2019, a certain Stanley Kubrick film became even more a part of the conversation.
08:28.643 --> 08:33.832
[SPEAKER_01]: People believe that maybe just maybe Kubrick's film predicted Epstein and all the damage that he had done.
08:34.814 --> 08:41.345
[SPEAKER_01]: Said Willa Paskin of Dakota Ring quote, The idea here was not that Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut happened to be thematically relevant again.
08:41.405 --> 08:45.091
[SPEAKER_01]: It was that Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut was concretely relevant.
08:45.712 --> 08:49.639
[SPEAKER_01]: Far from being a piece of fiction, emerging theory around the film is this.
08:49.619 --> 08:56.374
[SPEAKER_01]: that Kubrick supposedly had come across some information that they were rich people that were trafficking children and he decided to make a movie about it.
08:56.955 --> 09:06.295
[SPEAKER_01]: When he did and showed it to the studio Warner Brothers, a rich and powerful company, they called the secret ring to have him killed to prevent this information from reaching the masses.
09:06.275 --> 09:22.121
[SPEAKER_01]: And the sex cult that he was referencing, this big group of powerful people, somehow had the movie edited before it was released in theaters, and then this rich and powerful sex cult he was referencing, somehow had the movie edited before it was released in theaters, had the movie edited to get rid of all of the most incriminating details.
09:22.622 --> 09:23.924
[SPEAKER_01]: So where are you out with this?
09:24.805 --> 09:25.887
[SPEAKER_01]: What's going on in your head?
09:26.322 --> 09:39.023
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's such like the movie itself is like sort of one of a kind, so I get that aspect of it and it's very easy to kind of, I mean, just so many things happened.
09:39.825 --> 09:41.107
[SPEAKER_00]: Stanley Kubrick is kind of known.
09:41.267 --> 09:47.898
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, as, you know, he had, he even has last movie that he, you know, he died was AI, right?
09:47.918 --> 09:49.140
[SPEAKER_00]: That was his move.
09:49.160 --> 09:51.925
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's always been a lot around Stanley Kubrick.
09:51.905 --> 09:56.871
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well around like sci-fi, the digital age, digital conspiracy.
09:56.891 --> 09:58.954
[SPEAKER_00]: That is prophetic in that sense.
09:58.974 --> 09:59.695
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
09:59.715 --> 10:08.866
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, I mean, when we talk about other movies that he's made that have conspiracies woven around them, we can talk about, you know, the theory that he shot the moon landing.
10:08.966 --> 10:12.150
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a popular one that I perpetuated growing up.
10:12.791 --> 10:21.422
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, subliminal messages and codes around subliminal messages and codes in the shining.
10:21.402 --> 10:29.038
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's a whole documentary about the shining and the messages that he was allegedly trying to communicate in that movie.
10:29.740 --> 10:33.227
[SPEAKER_01]: But eyes wide shut really connected with people in this specific time and place.
10:33.508 --> 10:36.734
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me share some evidence that people who believe this theory point two in the movie.
10:37.135 --> 10:37.977
[SPEAKER_01]: First.
10:37.957 --> 10:43.143
[SPEAKER_01]: The film has a lot of Illuminati symbolism, and it's about a secret society, so mapping, right?
10:43.283 --> 10:43.864
[SPEAKER_01]: Pretty generally.
10:44.565 --> 10:49.370
[SPEAKER_01]: People think that it's using a blueprint of the Illuminati, or some such society, and kind of riffing off of it.
10:50.051 --> 10:59.442
[SPEAKER_01]: Second, the women in the ritual origin scene all appear to be adults, but close watchers point to a few other scenes that demonstrate that Kubrick was trying to expose sex trafficking.
10:59.422 --> 11:13.320
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you remember the scene, but there's one with actor Lili Slebioski and she's kind of being sold to Tom Cruise's character by her father at a store at a costume store, disturbing, but Puno's.
11:14.141 --> 11:20.849
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there's the final scene in the film, arguably the, to theorists, the most powerful evidence that this theory is real.
11:21.971 --> 11:28.399
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I don't have to show you this one
11:29.054 --> 11:32.359
[SPEAKER_01]: about theory, I mean, I don't think so.
11:32.519 --> 11:35.584
[SPEAKER_01]: I just, I can't, not to spoiler alert.
11:35.644 --> 11:38.910
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't believe this theory, but it's so subtle.
11:38.930 --> 11:43.717
[SPEAKER_01]: And what we'll talk about why conspiracy theorists weave the subtlety into their theory as well.
11:43.937 --> 11:47.964
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's so subtle and it's so generalized.
11:48.024 --> 11:53.012
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've talked about, you know, a couple minutes ago, how this theme perpetuates itself throughout history, too.
11:53.052 --> 11:54.454
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, we want to believe in it.
11:54.434 --> 12:09.861
[SPEAKER_00]: like a ritualistic secret society we love that stuff the general idea that there's like rich and powerful people in there that get away with stuff yeah is in a very general sense sure yeah and it's true like rich and powerful people do get away with stuff definitely
12:09.841 --> 12:37.080
[SPEAKER_00]: you know is he was you know Stanley Cooper kind of like yeah I'm a filmmaker but more importantly I want to expose things first I I don't know I feel like probably it's being a filmmaker was probably and making a good film was probably the most important thing and compromising that just to kind of have this kind of you know is a campaign to like expose something
12:37.060 --> 12:38.362
[SPEAKER_00]: that might get in the way of that.
12:38.402 --> 12:39.223
[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't see that.
12:39.523 --> 12:45.270
[SPEAKER_01]: No, if you want to expose something called the police, you know, do something where it's like, hey, this is bad.
12:45.471 --> 12:54.622
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all about non-subtle messaging these days, but the fact that he spent millions and millions of dollars and more than a year and a half to make a very subtle film.
12:54.642 --> 12:59.068
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, do you think he had Tom Cruise walk through a door 95 times because he's like,
12:59.048 --> 12:59.749
[SPEAKER_01]: the cabal.
13:00.030 --> 13:00.370
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
13:00.851 --> 13:01.653
[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't.
13:01.893 --> 13:04.178
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't really track for me.
13:04.378 --> 13:04.719
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
13:04.759 --> 13:06.622
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, all the theorists have answers to this.
13:06.642 --> 13:11.311
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's go back to that scene that end scene which I watched again recently before you even got here to record.
13:11.351 --> 13:12.633
[SPEAKER_01]: It's Harvard.
13:13.074 --> 13:13.475
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
13:13.615 --> 13:14.577
[SPEAKER_01]: That's me.
13:14.557 --> 13:16.420
[SPEAKER_01]: It's Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
13:16.440 --> 13:22.310
[SPEAKER_01]: They're Christmas shopping with their daughter at kind of an FAO Schwartz thing and they're they're kind of wind It's actually a beautiful shot.
13:22.330 --> 13:22.951
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really long shot.
13:22.971 --> 13:34.771
[SPEAKER_01]: They're winding through the Hallways of this giant toy store and the daughter's looking at different things and they're kind of interacting with her and they're interacting with each other But there's this very and again when I say subtle.
13:34.791 --> 13:38.657
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean so so subtle moment
13:38.637 --> 13:46.467
[SPEAKER_01]: Where you see the kid rounding a corner into an aisle and you see her being followed by two male extras.
13:47.408 --> 13:53.135
[SPEAKER_01]: The two men theorist claim can be seen earlier in the film and they returned here at the end to take the girl away.
13:53.175 --> 13:55.298
[SPEAKER_01]: It is so quick.
13:55.478 --> 14:06.872
[SPEAKER_01]: I promise you you will not even notice it.
14:06.852 --> 14:19.512
[SPEAKER_01]: Very subtly, Kidman's character pushes her child towards the two older men, and again, this is minuscule, and she walks off essentially with them, forcing her into this life of brainwashing and Dr. Nation torture.
14:19.933 --> 14:24.781
[SPEAKER_01]: In exchange, she will become a member of this elite world.
14:26.043 --> 14:34.176
[SPEAKER_01]: This moment is, you blink and you miss it, and it's what people hold up as definitive proof
14:35.641 --> 14:38.924
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll have to let me know what you think of it when you watch the film.
14:39.585 --> 14:44.489
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the film that was released is just a version of this original movie, right, according to theorists.
14:44.590 --> 14:50.795
[SPEAKER_01]: And the original Kubrick had harder evidence, according to them, that there was things happening with the sex trafficking ring.
14:50.815 --> 14:56.961
[SPEAKER_01]: So when people say that it's subtle, these theorists are like actually there was a different film that had much more concrete evidence in it.
14:57.982 --> 15:04.028
[SPEAKER_01]: But that didn't see the light of day because the movie itself was tampered with after Kubrick's death.
15:04.717 --> 15:05.238
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
15:05.378 --> 15:07.262
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go back to Stanley Kubrick's death.
15:07.502 --> 15:09.907
[SPEAKER_01]: The timing to me does see read strange.
15:10.107 --> 15:16.820
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like mere days after you're done with this film kind of done, you die heartbreaking, like really tragic actually.
15:16.860 --> 15:23.012
[SPEAKER_01]: But in this theory, Kubrick was killed because he made eyes wide shut and it was going to blow the whole whistle on the cabal.
15:22.992 --> 15:36.890
[SPEAKER_01]: The 23-something minutes cut from the version Warner Bros. saw because of the rating was due to theorists, to the studio protecting the Kabul, cutting the film to remove evidence, and alerting them to what Stanley Cooper could done, thus ending his life.
15:37.691 --> 15:45.000
[SPEAKER_01]: But in re-editing the movie the Kabul failed to remove a handful of extremely subtle clues from the film, the ones that we just went through.
15:45.942 --> 15:55.041
[SPEAKER_01]: The theory got even more popular in 2024 when Roger Avery, the director of rules of attraction and the co-writer of pulp fiction, goes on the Joe Rogan experience.
15:55.831 --> 15:57.213
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, here we are.
15:57.894 --> 16:03.981
[SPEAKER_01]: Avery and Rogan start talking about Stanley Kubrick and Roger Avery tells Rogan a story about eyes wide shut.
16:04.782 --> 16:18.058
[SPEAKER_01]: Avery says that while they were first screening the movie in England, there were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside, and inside Kubrick was yelling at executives and saying, it's my movie, you can't cut it, you can't cut my film, blah, blah, blah arguing, then Kubrick dies.
16:18.038 --> 16:23.652
[SPEAKER_01]: Roger Avery admits that he had heard the story second hand from a William Morris agent who has since conveniently died.
16:24.234 --> 16:25.678
[SPEAKER_01]: But of course, it seemed credible.
16:25.778 --> 16:27.262
[SPEAKER_01]: And Avery is a Hollywood insider.
16:27.302 --> 16:33.297
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a writer and director talking to Joe Rogan, one of the most influential podcasters.
16:33.277 --> 16:38.289
[SPEAKER_01]: But the question remains, why make a movie about elite sex trafficking and why not just like call the police?
16:39.131 --> 16:48.332
[SPEAKER_01]: It took Kubrick decades to make the film, which feels like a very slow and ultimately kind of subtle way to break up or alert people to this powerful cabal.
16:48.312 --> 16:53.867
[SPEAKER_01]: As for cutting lots of damning sex cult evidence from the film, well, the reality was far different.
16:54.408 --> 17:01.026
[SPEAKER_01]: Exxx were reluctant to cut anything out of Kubrick's film because it was the author's last masterpiece as a person who was living.
17:01.166 --> 17:04.515
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the AI one that he made after that called?
17:04.597 --> 17:05.859
[SPEAKER_00]: called Artificial Intelligence.
17:05.879 --> 17:08.743
[SPEAKER_01]: So those are reasons that this theory is dispelled.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kubrick's even his co-writer, Frederick Grafail, told Dakota Ring that Kubrick was quote, 70 years old and looked about 120.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was very stressed and producing that movie was enough to kill him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Stanley Kubrick's final film was fiction, but in the mid-2000s it felt like so much more.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Epstein's world seemed elusive, powerful and terrifying, and the systemic trauma around what he had done was, it is almost too much to bear.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps this conspiracy is so compelling because we wanted someone to have known, and wanted someone to have tried to do something, we wanted it to be real.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We wanted this conspiracy to be real.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'll leave you with another quote by Willa Pascin, which sums it up really well, okay?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Quote, believing even something is disturbing as the conspiracy about eyes wide shut is more comforting than reality, which is that so many people knew and said nothing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But in the conspiracy, in its alternate reality, at least someone, a powerful man no less, tried to warn us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's all a fiction, but you can understand why it might be preferable to the facts.
